​Kirchner calls for Argentine intelligence service overhaul

Argentina’s president has announced a plan to dissolve the country’s top intelligence agency and replace it with a new body that will battle international threats from terrorism, drug and human trafficking, and cyber crimes.

Cristina Fernández de
Kirchner said that by the end of the week, she will propose a
bill to Argentine lawmakers calling on the dissolution of the
State Intelligence Secretariat (SI, SIDE), to be replaced by a
Federal Intelligence Agency which “will work in preventing
international threats from the terrorism , drug trafficking,
human trafficking and cybercrime.”

Fernandez said Monday night that reforming the intelligence
service has long been a “national debt,” while the
battle against “impunity” has become a priority of her
government.

The announcement of the intelligence network restructuring comes
after the mysterious death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman in his
Buenos Aires apartment on January 18 in what prosecutors
initially said appeared to be a suicide. The timing of the death,
however, has raised questions among the public as Nisman was set
to reveal evidence in the case of a 1994 bombing of a Jewish
center which left 85 dead, allegedly implicating Kirchner in a
cover-up.

The evidence, much of which is believed to have originated from
secret wire taps, implicated Kirchner and her top aides in secret
“grain for oil” trade deals with Iranians, who have been
blamed for the attack.

The prosecutor collected a 300-page file, which he based on
wiretaps. According to Nisman’s files, the president and foreign
minister tried not to incriminate the Iranian officials in order
to promote good trade relations between the two countries.

Defending her image in the wake of the scandal, Kirchner called
Nisman’s reported allegations “absurd.”

“It's unreasonable to think our government could even be
suspected of such a maneuver,” she said during an hour-long
speech.

In two letters this week, she suggested that Nisman’s death was a
plot against her government, possibly orchestrated by
intelligence services. “They used him while he was alive and
then they needed him dead. It is that sad and terrible,” she
wrote, according to the Buenos Aires Herald.